Features in Thunar \ How to change file manager?

After Ubuntu decided to go the Unity route I dumped it and found the only sensible alternative (for me) was Xubuntu and XFCE.

Now that I have jumped ship I am quite happy, but not completely. There are a couple of things that bug me, and they are all to do with Thunar.

I'm running the latest Xubuntu (12.04) which includes XFCE 4.8 and Thunar is v1.2.3

The problems I have are thus:

1) Thunar won't let me select multiple files\folders at once and show properties. This I find is the biggest issue. Every other file manager I've used can do this, and it makes no sense as to why Thunar can't.

If there is a way to enable\get this functionality, please let me know!

The other problems are less serious but would be nice if they could be changed:

2) It's hard to tell in Thunar when a volume is mounted or not. The only difference is that the icon becomes slightly darker, which is often not very obvious at all. I much prefer the way PCManFM and Nautilus do it, by showing \ hiding the eject button.

This is the least annoying as I can leave it on toolbar style but pathbar is sometimes useful, so having both or being able to easily switch would be nice.

I expect that none of these features (except perhaps the multiple file properties issue) will be implemented any time soon, however, there is a solution I have found - and that is to use the old Nautilus from Gnome2 (Now called Caja from MATE-Desktop)

Caja (Nautilus) solves all these three issues I have with Thunar but creates another problem:

How to set Caja as the default file manager and totally replace Thunar?